Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/291

Rh been added, in the person of the youngest son John, who had been born in 1652, and was still a baby, and now marriage gave another son, who valued her almost as heartily as her own. Seaborn Cotton, whose name held always a reminder of the stormy days on which his eyes opened, had grown into a decorous youth, a course at Harvard, and an entering of his father's profession, and though the old record holds no details, it is easy to read between the lines, the story that told itself alike to Puritan and Cavalier, and to which Mistress Dorothy listened with a flutter beneath the gray gown that could not disguise the pretty girlish outlines of her dainty figure. Dorothy, as well as the other daughters, had been carefully trained in every housewifely art, and though part of her mother's store of linen bleached in Lincolnshire meadows, may have helped to swell her simple outfit, it is probable that she spun and wove much of it herself. A fulling mill, where the cloth made at home was finished and pressed, had been built very early in the history of the town, and while there were "spinsters" who went from house to house, much of the work was done by mother and daughters. Seaborn Cotton, who must often during his courtship have ridden over from Boston, found Dorothy like the Priscilla she may have known, busy in the graceful fashion of that older time, and—

Like Priscilla, too, she must have said—